Word: frenchness
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Coup de Glace Re "The French for Entrepreneur" [Sept. 7]: I live in France and I hold one of the government's new auto-entrepreneur licenses to sell cold drinks and ice cream from a tricycle. While I congratulate the government on its new initiative, once you clear away the "jungle of administrative red tape" there are still the local traditions to deal with. Permission to trade has to be sought from each mairie. I applied to 11 and got permission to trade from only one. Even my local village has refused me. France may have rediscovered the word entrepreneur...
...help that Merkel's hands are likely to be less tied in a coalition with the economically liberal Free Democrats than they were with the Social Democrats - a change that could push Germany closer to the French line on nuclear power and relations with Russia. But what isn't yet known is how warmly the Free Democrats will embrace closer cooperation with France. They won 14.6% of the vote, a record result for the party, and their leader, Guido Westerwelle, is likely to become the next Foreign Minister. His campaign focused on how to revive Germany's economy...
...formidable corporate power broker. At a recent panel discussion in Paris, Léo Apotheker, the CEO of German software firm SAP, endorsed many of the institute's ideas and lamented that the recent financial crisis "showed the nonexistence of Europe." He also advocated merging the French employers' association Medef with its German counterpart, the Federation of German Industries...
...paper authored by Wolfgang Schäuble, a close confidant of then Chancellor Kohl, and Karl Lamers, then foreign-affairs spokesman for Merkel's Christian Democratic Union. They outlined a new "core" Europe in which France and Germany would make up the inner "core of the core." The French never formally replied to that proposal. That was "a mistake," says Jean-Pierre Jouyet, the former French Minister for European Affairs who now heads the national stock-market regulatory agency...
...France is pushing closer ties and Lamers, since retired, believes both countries have finally gotten the message. "Sarkozy has learned and realized that he, too, has made mistakes in the past," he says, citing the French President's initiative for a Mediterranean Union which caused irritation in Berlin in 2007. "There's an understanding on both sides now that the countries need each other...